I've been going back to older sprites to see if I can make something a little more interesting based off of them, now that I have a little more skill.
Before (a year and a half ago or so) -> after (now). I'll be the first one to say that my customing is a lot more rough around the edges than my splicing (and I'm still terrible at hair), but dang if I'm not proud of the fact that I full-customed something with lots of references. The shoulder pads need a lot of work as well (I was going for a samurai-ish look, and she's supposed to be in a similar position to Neimi but ended up just looking scrunched), but it's a start, right?

Anyway, that's how I'm doing, but now I'll throw out a more discussion-bait open question to everyone: why/how did you come to spriting? I always made them with the intent of using them in FE mods (most recent iteration of my project being in the making for a few months now), but after I found my groove and started making splices instead of pop-tarts I found it was an excellent way to depict characters in general (not just a means to the end of populating a mod with useable units). Nowadays, I put more emphasis on interesting character design (I want as many units as possible to elicit that "oh man look at that guy/girl I HAVE to use them" feeling) over clean spriting, for better or worse. The funny thing is that even as I'm trying to branch away from FE-style for non-FEmod characters, I still inevitably slip back into the style before veering myself back on the path to something less FE-looking.... gosh why do my posts always turn out so damn long.

I haven't submitted anything to the most recent one because my laptop with all my FE stuff on it was stolen recently. I'm on a craptop until I get a new home base to re-set up all my FE stuff on, so I'm out of contests until then (obviously my spriting ability wasn't somehow stolen, but my morale got damaged enough for me to not want to start again for a while).

That being said, I don't blame you for not wanting to keep up a dead splice contest. .ш.